Most encryption schemes are based on some computational assumptions. (The only encryption scheme which is not based on any assumption requires the communicating parties to continuously meet and establish a private key.) Some of the assumptions are quite strong and might turn out to be false. For example, the RSA encryption scheme is based on the assumption that factoring large composite numbers is computationally infeasible in a reasonable amount of time. However, it has been shown that using quantum computers it is possible to factor, making this assumption false with regard to quantum computers. Recently, with the advancement in quantum computation technology, the threat to encryption schemes based on the hardness of factoring assumption increases. Therefore, it is of interest to base encryption schemes on the weakest assumption possible.
Another important feature in encryption schemes is their computational efficiency. Even the most practical encryption schemes usually are quite costly and require at least one exponentiation. In the scheme presented here, the computation is reduced to the minimum. The only computation required in order to create the ciphertext is embedding the bits of the message in a larger data stream. This increased efficiency is achieved by utilizing bandwidth. In particular, to encrypt the message it is embedded into a larger data stream in such a way that an adversary cannot find the embedded message. This is particularly beneficial when the cost of bandwidth is less expensive relative to the cost of computation.